Book Review:
RAJ DAYS TO
DOWNUNDER: A Compelling Collection of Anglo-Indian Oral Histories
By: Kathleen Cassity
Associate
Professor of English
Hawaii
Pacific University
McMenamin,
Dorothy. Raj Days to Downunder: Voices from Anglo India to New Zealand. Christchurch,
New Zealand: Dorothy McMenamin, 2010.
315 pp.
When it comes to publishing, we
currently live in an age characterized by fierce cross-currents. Traditional publishing, both popular and academic,
is dramatically contracting in the face of seismic technological shifts and
economic pressures. Yet the same
technological innovations that place pressure on the traditional gatekeepers of
public thought have also spawned an explosion of self-published works, enabling
the stories of less well-known groups such as the Anglo-Indians to circulate more
widely than ever. Dorothy McMenamin’s
comprehensive collection of oral histories, Raj
Days to Downunder: Voices from Anglo India to New Zealand, is one of the
latest such endeavors, and a worthwhile one it is.
Many
gatekeepers and guardians of “tradition,” especially within the confines of
academia, remain suspicious of self-published volumes (no self-published
academic writer, for instance, could ever hope to gain tenure in an academic
institution). Yet despite these
naysayers, self-published texts continue to find an increasingly wide audience. The Anglo-Indian Community has particularly benefited
from the development of self-publishing, since traditional venues have tended
to represent Anglo-Indians in one of three ways: by stereotyping them, by disparaging
them, or by ignoring them. For
communities such as ours, self-publication (or, if one prefers, “independently
produced literature”) can serve an important purpose beyond the derogatory
cliché of “vanity publishing”: it can provide would-be writers and readers
alike with an effective means of circulating stories regarding identities and
experiences that are insufficiently understood by the publishing
gatekeepers. Raj Days to Downunder stands as an excellent example of how
independently produced literature can give widen the audience for the stories
of those who lack a significant public
voice.
Produced
with sturdy softback cover and in coffee-table size, Raj Days to Downunder provides twenty-nine stories, gathered
between 1997 and 2008, of Anglo-Indians with New Zealand connections. This attractive and hefty volume gains
credibility from professionally written forewords provided by Megan Hutching
(Past President of the National Oral History Association of New Zealand) and
Mervin Singham (Director of Ethnic Affairs in Wellington). These reviewers appropriately praise the
volume as “add[ing] to our understanding of the social history of not only this
country [New Zealand] but that of Colonial India and modern South Asia”
(Hutching, qtd. in McMenamin 7), and “build[ing] human connections through the
art of story telling” (Singham, qtd. in McMenamin 7). A well-written and thorough six-page
introduction, including attractive black-and-white photographs, provides a
helpful—and, considering its complexity, remarkably succinct—context in which
to understand the Anglo-Indian oral histories, stories and photographs that follow.
McMenamin
lucidly and sensitively elucidates both the colonial and postcolonial contexts
that have continued to render the representation of Anglo-Indian lives
problematic in most mainstream contexts.
Explaining why she undertook this project, McMenamin states that when
studying “academic accounts of life in British India,” she “found no resonances
with the fond memories I held about my own life” (13). In colonial contexts, McMenamin states,
Anglo-Indians were typically “depicted as a downtrodden community, both by
British and Indian historians” (13), who also “perpetuated the misconceived
assumption that Anglo Indians were a homogeneous community, which they
certainly are not” (13). When McMenamin
mentioned this disjuncture to Indian historians at the University of
Canterbury, she was instructed to “obtain the evidence” to back up her
assertions (13), and thus her research began.
While
representations of Anglo-Indians had always been proven problematic in the
colonial era, McMenamin notes, the postcolonial era presents yet another
constellation of challenges when it comes to Anglo-Indian representation. McNenamin concedes that critiques of colonial
rule are valid, but points out that postcolonial critiques have often “overlooked
the significance of what can be gained by closer scrutiny of the overlapping
cultures of east and west, and how these operated in what was one of the early
and extremely diverse plural societies of the twentieth century” (9). That “closer scrutiny” is just what McNenamin
undertakes here, through the twenty-nine transcribed interviews that she has
rendered into a tapestry of contrasting yet compelling illustrated stories of
Anglo-Indians whose connections are in New Zealand, and whose roots and memories
in India.
Raj Days to Downunder,
while too hefty for most readers to absorb in a single sitting, is clearly
organized into manageable sections and is the kind of volume that invites the
reader to dip in periodically, absorbing a few stories at a time. The book is divided into three sections based
on Indian geography—Calcutta and Bengal Stories, Northwest Region Stories, and
Burma, South India and Bombay Stories.
The sections are generally well balanced, with ten stories in Part I,
eleven in Part II, and nine in Part III (subdivided into three per area). Each entry is organized by topic, with appropriate
subheaders provided (such as “Family,” “Language,” “Religion,” “Servants,”
“Social Life,” and so forth) that allow for easy cross-referencing between
accounts. Not every subheader appears in
every story, however; McMenamin allows her subjects to tell their own stories such
that the subjects themselves determine the themes that emerge from their
accounts. Well-chosen photographs,
meanwhile, make McMenamin’s point regarding diversity within the Anglo-Indian
Community more effectively than mere prose ever could: As readers, we see for
ourselves the wide range of physical appearance, dress, occupation, and leisure
activities that the stories elucidate.
Taken
together, the Anglo-Indian oral histories and photographs leave the reader
feeling as though he or she has lived through a particular experience of India
as well as an experience of New Zealand; the voices, while not uniform, are
uniformly compelling. Readers (both
Anglo-Indian and not) will discover some world views with which they agree, as
well as some with which they disagree; when discussing issues as thorny as
India’s colonial past and the multifaceted subject-position of those whose own
genetic and cultural heritage is mixed, this kind of multifarious presentation
and complex reader response is to be expected.
Moreover, the diversity embedded within the stories McMenamin’s
overarching point: Anglo-Indians are not a homogenous community. Indeed, the reality, complexity, and
entanglement of Anglo-Indian experiences and identities are far more
fascinating (even when maddening) than any two-dimensional, stereotypical
caricature could ever be.
Raj Days Downunder is
an important addition to the library of anyone with an Anglo-Indian heritage or
an interest in Anglo-Indian matters, providing a necessary corrective to
mainstream accounts that tend to fluctuate between disparagement and
neglect. Anglo-Indians of the diaspora,
wherever they may be—whether “down under” in New Zealand or Australia, in North
America or Europe, still in India, or anywhere else—will certainly find it a
satisfying volume to keep nearby. But
beyond our own community, there is much here to appeal to anyone with an
interest in colonial history, postcolonial diaspora, life writing, or
oral/family history and genealogy more generally. Each day we are somehow reminded that the
world as we know it (or once knew it) is fading away—a prominent celebrity
dies, a longstanding community institution vanishes, something new emerges that
we feel ill prepared to understand. As
we become increasingly aware of the perpetual loss and change that accompanies
living, we also become mindful of the need to preserve voices, memories, and stories
from our elders that, without interventions such as McMenamin’s project, are
likely to fall into oblivion. There are still
so many voices that the gatekeepers of traditional publishing continue to
neglect. For all the potential downside
of current technology, for all that we fear might be threatened by
technological and economic change, it is also fortuitous for the
Anglo-Indians—as well as anyone interested in preserving the memories and
stories of those who are not already famous—that these changes have at the same
time made it possible for oral historians such as McMenamin to maneuver around
the gatekeepers and independently publish a work such as Raj Days to Downunder. Accordingly,
this book deserves a wide audience.
Copies of Raj Days to Downunder may be obtained by contacting the author at dorothysbookshop@gmail.com.
--------------------------------------------------
Kathleen Cassity is an Associate Professor of English at
Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, Hawaii USA, and holds a PhD in English
from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. An earlier version of this paper was
orally presented in June 2010 at the Biennial Conference of the International
Auto/Biography Association held at University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington USA, she is the
daughter of an Anglo-Indian immigrant from Chennai. She has been researching
the Anglo-Indians since 1994 when she wrote her prizewinning honors thesis,
"Voices from the Shadows: Locating the Anglo-Indian Subject in
Postcolonial Texts." She has published articles for IJAIS regarding the
novel Bhowani Junction and the film 36 Chowringhee Lane, has
presented a paper at the East-West Center's South Asia Symposium, and has
published fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry regarding the Anglo-Indian
experience. Her essay "Distances" appeared in CTR Publications'
anthology The Way We Are. Her short story "Butterfly" won
first place and publication in the anthology Voices from the Verandah, where
she also published two poems, "Chee Chee" and "Diaspora."
Cassity is currently conducting research in the field of Anglo-Indian life
writing and is working on a novel based on the Anglo-Indian diasporic
experience. She can be contacted at kcassity@hpu.edu.